Love Stores (for Love Stories)

"I took my troubles down to Madame Ruth. You know, that gypsy with the gold-capped tooth. She's got a pad down on 34th and Vine, selling little bottles of ... Love Potion #9." Love Stores of a different sort can be found five times in OhioLINK, making it a "low probability" typo on the Ballard list, but like love itself perhaps, worth taking a chance on. Searching more broadly on Stores + Stories, in fact, yields a much higher return of 101. These, however, do not all indicate typos. For example, the first one is for the title Did Monkeys Invent the Monkey Wrench? Hardware Stores and Hardware Stories, by Vince Staten. Whether your own story is a hard-luck one or not, you'll definitely feel better if you take your typos down to Madame Ruth. Or else just fix them up yourself.

(Composers Jerry Lieber & Mike Stoller, from the ASCAP Foundation's scholarship web page.)

Carol Reid